It’s Not How We Consume News that Matters, But Why

David Kellogg

September 16, 2015

There are exciting experiments under way to increase the size of news audiences and their level of engagement with news. What may be getting overlooked in these efforts is the question of consumer motivation. What drives us to read and follow news stories in the first place? If we could answer that, we might discover that different audience segments require not just totally different interfaces — but maybe even totally different news content.

Many of the experiments focus on finding new ways to deliver traditional journalism to a mass audience via new (especially mobile and social) platforms, new multimedia and interactive formats, supported by new revenue models.

Others are trying to steer journalism itself in new directions, for example by

• engaging audiences in story selection and news gathering
• improving on storytelling techniques to increase engagement
• publishing single-topic news sites dedicated to particularly complex issues
• refocusing stories away from problems and toward assessing plausible solutions
• harnessing data journalism to empower journalists to find and compose stories directly from vast new stores of numerical data

Still others are seeking to build new forms of journalism entirely. For example, the proponents of Structured Journalism want to extend the shelf-life of news articles by unlocking the information value that is currently hidden in one-off stories, structuring them to support reuse of the information in subsequent stories.

Some of these experiments have a chance to dominate the news market. But the biggest breakout solution for news may turn out to be a combination of all of them, because a “one size fits all” solution is unlikely. To prove that, we need to learn more from the prospective audiences, because we still understand too little about the role the news can play in our lives.

A recent Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism report identified the top three motivations for following news as “to know what is going on in the world around me,” “to understand how news may affect me,” and “habit.” The Reuters report also confirmed the relative appeal of different types of news. Ranking lowest for U.S. respondents were arts and culture (10%) and entertainment and celebrity news (13%), while local news (52%) and national news (56%) scored highest.

These results don’t give us nearly enough on which to base conclusions about how to serve news audiences better.

Following are some questions to pose to news consumers, which I think could shed light on what they need.

1. What distinctions do you make between different types of news? For example, what different value do you draw from local, national, international, business, cultural, sports, science, and health news, and what roles do the different types of news play in your daily life?
2. Different readers often have conflicting interests in a given news story, depending on how it affects them. For example, if you identify primarily with business owners, your interest in a story about the minimum wage may differ from that of an hourly worker or a social activist. Can one story satisfy all these points of view, or should news consumers have access to different versions of the story that focus on each separately?
3. When you are following a story over several days, how do your needs evolve? Do you usually want to go deeper into the topic or just learn the latest developments?
4. In what ways should coverage of an unfamiliar topic differ from coverage of a topic you follow closely? How often do you find you want more background information? Are there certain types of story for which you are more likely to want additional background?
5. When your interest in a story leads you to want to learn substantially more about the topic, how much time and effort would you usually be willing to devote to that?
6. What if news stories responded to where you were on the “knowledge curve” for a given topic? Some stories you follow closely, others you are unfamiliar with. Would you like to choose from different entry points into a story based on how much you know and your level of personal interest in the story?
7. Other than learning more about a topic, what other actions do news stories prompt you to take?
8. What additional tools and resources could the news story provide to increase your chances of taking one or more of those actions?

If these questions are on the right track, we may be ready for a new convergence of journalism and education (or, more precisely, personalized journalism and adaptive learning) to better deliver the understanding that consumers want.

Education can be a dirty word for journalists — they break news, they tell stories, they don’t teach. But journalism’s job is to inform us, to make us smarter about our community, country, and world. And sometimes that may require a dose of education.

But first, let’s do the research.